She proposed the idea when we were lifting weights. It was a
late Friday night in New York and we were doing what we had
fallen into a lot that spring--we'd meet at the World Gym, lift,
and then go eat. Rat was wearing a black one-piece suit that
looked like the sort of thing bathing beauties wore on the
Riviera in the twenties. There's a picture around of Zelda trying
to look sexy and she's wearing something similar. Only
Rat--that was her name, Rachel Kelly, but even her mom
called her Rat--hers was all shiny and made from some sort of
hightech sports stretchy stuff that was supposed to do
miraculous things, like make sure you never sweat or whisk the
sweat away from your skin, something like that. I never could
get this kind of thing straight, but Rat knew all about it. She was
an ex-model who worked for a fashion designer and could
explain quite movingly why some grades of wool make you look
like a million dollars and others, you were better off cutting a
few holes in a big plastic garbage sack and heading out the
door. Call it a flair for fashion.

I had never known anybody who worked in the fashion
business. I had also never known a woman who was almost six
feet tall and could bench-press more than my IQ. Not that there
aren't a lot of strong women in the world these days, and most
seem to find their way to the gyms of New York. I've seen women
in New York health clubs that I'd trade a first-round draft pick
for without even knowing what they did in the forty-yard dash.
You know what I mean--BIG WOMEN. Strong women.

But Rat wasn't like them, you see. She didn't look BIG,
just tall and lithe, at least until she took off the old University of
Wyoming tee shirt she liked to wear, the one with the bucking
horse and the slogan "Ride with Me Wyoming," and got down
to just that shiny black old-fashioned bathing-suit thing and you
saw her pick up seventy-five pounds of curl bar the way my
high school girlfriends in Mississippi used to hoist diet sodas.

Anyway, we were working on incline presses and she put
it something like this: "What if we went to Europe and ate. Ate
a lot."

This surprised me. Not that she liked the idea of eating but
the notion of us traveling together. Somewhere in the
background there was a serious boyfriend I had always figured
to be of the live-in variety. He was a lawyer, I knew, and older,
a midforties guy who was a partner in one of the big white-shoe
law factories. Rat had talked about how he didn't like it when
she introduced herself at firm functions as "Rat" Kelly. She had
tried to reassure him, she told me, by explaining to him that all
his partners were way too busy thinking about how they wanted
to sleep with her to worry about her name.

"I'm sure he found that very reassuring," I said.

"Not really." She frowned. "Lawyers in love." She shrugged.

"Europe?" I asked her how, as we changed weights
ferociously. We liked to lift quickly, pyramiding up to a
maximum and then working down. This may seem unimportant
but it was a matter of great controversy in the gym, where you
either believed in pyramiding or you didn't, and blows had
actually been exchanged over this subject, though usually by the
heavy steroid users and nobody paid much attention.

"I think we should go," she said decisively. "Just to eat."
She said this last bit because I was looking sort of skeptical.

We liked to eat and did it a lot. It was really all we did
together, go to restaurants and the gym, which made, I suppose,
for an appallingly shallow sort of New York nineties-styled
friendship. This never bothered me at all. Rat was an inspiration
in the gym and a pleasure around the dinner table and neither
one of us cared to ask a lot of difficult questions. The truth was,
I really didn't know Rat Kelly very well at all. Later, I would
think about this a lot, when it was entirely too late.

"Where?" I asked, as she slipped under the bar.

"Start in England. Work our way over to France."

France. Which made me think about the first great meal I
ever had.

I thought I could remember every bite, even though it had
been a whole bunch of years. I know I swore at the time I'd
never forget. I'm positive we had sweet mussels, tiny little things,
in a sauce of white wine, cream, and chives. There was lobster
doused, oddly, with port and grilled with butter. She had a
bouillabaisse and I had grilled sardines, the only time, before or
since, I've ever liked the things. I can't imagine why I ordered
them, but maybe the waiter insisted or maybe it was because I
was excited seeing a name--sardines--on the menu that I
actually recognized. It was, after all, my first time in France.

We were in a little restaurant on the side of a cliff in a town
called Eze, wedged between Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Monte
Carlo. I was nineteen, I think, and on one of the many
interminable vacations that Oxford likes to provide. She was a
few years older, an American, but she had lived in France for a
while, which seemed very impressive and somehow important.
It was late March and not far away there were almost-nude
women lying on rocks they called a beach.

I swore then that before long I would come back and eat
in every good restaurant in France.

Which, of course, I never did.

Instead I seemed to be drawn to countries with the worst
food imaginable, places like Turkistan and Africa, where every
day you woke up hoping you could avoid gustatory terror but
knowing that before you slept again, horrible things would be
going inside your mouth. The best strategy was simply to try to
eat as little as possible. But I seemed cursed by an ever hopeful
palate. "Termites? Termite larva? Could be interesting. I'll try a
handful." This was never a good idea.

But France ...

"Stuart!" Rat yelled. Her face was bright red as she
struggled under some impossibly large weight.

I snapped out of my gustatory trance and helped her right
the bar. "You are some big help. Like lifting with Carl, for
Christ's sake."

Carl was the lawyer Rat called her boyfriend. And he
hated gyms and exercise. That much, at least, I knew.

"What restaurants?"

"Three-stars," she said without a moment's hesitation.
"Just the Michelin three-stars. The best food in the world."

"When do you want to go?" I asked.

"How about next week?"

The car started on the first crank. This made me very
happy and inexplicably proud.

The dockworkers all gave exuberant thumbs-up signs, as if
we had just test-fired the space shuttle. Without blowing anyone
up.

The engine was about as loud as the space shuttle but with
a deeper, sexier growl. In the closed belly of the cargo ship
that had brought it over from America, it sounded like a wild
beast anxious to escape its cage. I squeezed down gently on the
accelerator.

The car leapt forward. The dockworkers applauded.

The gangplank was pitched at a ferocious angle. With my
ears ringing with the growl of the V-8 engine, I put on the
brakes. Nothing happened. This was not good.

The Mustang leapt down the gangplank. A pair of workers
in white smocks jumped for safety. "I can't stop!" I yelled,
redundantly. The top was down. That was the first thing I had
done, of course. Put the top down.

I steered toward the parking lot next to the docks. It was
large and empty and I drove the car in a circle, wondering what
in God's name I was going to do. Like concerned physicians,
dockworkers in their white coats gathered around as I drove
the car in a tight circle. Or at least as tight as a 1965 Mustang
would turn.

The workers yelled advice. With the engine roar and their
thick accents, I had trouble understanding them. One fellow
with long sideburns of the type favored by Elvis in his later
years held up his hand and motioned. At first I didn't
understand but then it made perfect sense. I could read his lips:

"TURN OFF THE DAMN ENGINE!"

Which I did.

It shuddered to a stop.

"What's the problem, mate?"

"The brakes don't work."

A long pause ensued while they all nodded their heads as
if the X rays had come back showing particularly nasty stuff.

"Now, mate," the one with the Elvis sideburns finally
offered, "you are buggered but good."

When I finally pulled into the Royal Overseas League, Rat
was having tea in the garden.

"So is the car beautiful?" she wanted to know.

I groaned and sank into the uncomfortable wrought-iron
chairs. With shaky hands I took a sip of her tea and realized for
the first time that my hands were filthy. Rat took one of the linen
napkins and wiped off my face.

"You look terrible," she said. "Was car-car naughty?"

This struck me as both a phenomenally idiotic and
annoying question, rather like asking a soldier on leave from the
Somme, "Was it muddy?"

A young waitress appeared over me. She seemed amused
at my condition.

"Beer. I can have beer, can't I?"I asked.

"You can have all the beer we've got," she promised and
scampered off.

"El Cid has problems?" Rat asked. For some reason she
had always referred to the Mustang as El Cid.

I looked around the garden. A young couple dressed in
white sat across from us drinking Mumm's champagne. They
were maybe twenty at the most and looked at each other with a
first-date longing that filled the air with sex. With their white
clothes and prim haircuts, the ostentatious champagne, the two
could have been period pieces of twenty, thirty, fifty years ago.
They spoke in guarded conversation that never steered close to
the lust that hung between them--just a little bit of English
repressed desire perfectly captured for the ages.

The other tables were filled with the sort of people you'd
expect to turn up at a lecture entitled "New Geographic
Discoveries in Ancient Turkey," the evening's entertainment at
the Royal Overseas League. Through some odd series of events
involving an obscure friend, Rat and I had ended up staying at
this place, where the Mountbatten lecture hall seemed to await
his eminent return.

Looking out over the shaded garden just a hedge away
from the lush greens of St. James's Park, I thought back to the motorway
rest stop where I'd spent a lot of the hot June afternoon. It had
been crowded with scores of tie-dyed Grateful Dead fans
jockeying for space with the English version of Hell's Angels,
mostly a polite bunch on Japanese bikes that would have been
whacked to pieces with baseball bats by real bikers on Harleys
in America. The bikers I'd liked more than the Deadheads. The
bikers had helped me with the brakes while the Deadheads
stood around the Mustang and said "Cool" a lot.

I looked over at Rat. She had a happy gleam in her eye
that didn't quite figure.

"We have a little problem," I told her. "With the brakes." I
started to explain how at the moment the brake system was held
together with a throttle spring borrowed from the saddlebags of
a well-equipped Honda rider, but it seemed too preposterous
even to talk about. The Mustang, after all, had been my idea.

Sitting in New York it had seemed most important to
make the trip in a very American car, and an old Mustang
convertible was perfect. That way no one could think we were
English--a particularly disturbing notion--or French, which
would also be highly regrettable. All of my car aficionado friends
assured me we could sell it at the end of the trip for a handsome
profit. This was very appealing considering the dollar-to-foie
gras exchange rate. Which is how I ended up on the phone to a
place called Mid-American Mustang in St. Louis, buying a
candy-apple red 1965 Mustang convertible I had never seen
and wouldn't see, circumstances being a bit rushed, until I had
arrived in Southampton that morning to drive it not so
triumphantly off the boat.

For a moment Rat seemed truly worried. "But you drove
it here? It made it?"

"Yes. Sort of. But we may die the first time we try to
drive it."

"Oh, that's okay," she said cheerfully, standing up. "Come
here, I have to show you something."

She stood up, and for the first time I saw that she was
wearing a gold lame dress that had been easy to pack because
there wasn't much of it. The teenagers drinking champagne
stared unhesitantly.

I followed.

She walked over to the far corner of the garden, where a
little iron gate led out onto Queen's Walk and, just beyond that,
St. James's Park.

She pointed to a contented-looking golden retriever tied
to the fence.

"What's that?" I asked, a sense of dread cascading rapidly
through my being.

"That's Henry, and he's ours!"

"Rat." I could still hear the roar of the Mustang's V-8 in
my ears. In all likelihood, I had suffered permanent hearing loss.
"Where did this come from?"

"I'll tell you all about it," she promised. "Isn't he adorable?"

We left the Mustang at the Overseas League and took the
train to the Waterside Inn. There were three of us--me, Rat,
and the Dog. That's how I thought of the creature--the Dog.
Rat, of course, called it Henry. She called it Henry in quite
loving tones that I'm sure would have driven Carl the Lawyer
mad with jealousy. But I refused to think of the Dog as Henry.
Even though Henry was a name I liked not in the least, Henry
was a name, and any sort of name, particularly a first name like
Henry, implied a sort of intimacy I had no intention of
establishing with the Dog. The Dog was not going to be part of
this trip, of that I was certain.

There were three of us on the train because there was no
easy place to leave the Dog. This is the sort of problem that
people traveling with dogs have all the time, or so I imagined,
and one good reason I did not own a dog or intend ever to
travel with the same. As far as I was concerned, man had spent
thousands of years evolving to the point where it was no longer
necessary to sleep and travel with animals, and I felt a certain
personal obligation not to let this progress backslide.

British Rail seems to share my canine attitudes. They have
a list of regulations that basically outline the hows and whys of
dog transport, a long list that boils down to the fact that they
prefer all dogs to schedule a session with a taxidermist before
availing themselves of the services of British Rail--an entirely
sensible position, I felt.

An Anglo-Indian rail official with a long ponytail stopped
Rat as she was strolling onto the 8:05 local to Bray-on-Thames.
He was maybe twenty-five and somehow wore his blue British
Rail uniform with a certain jauntiness, as if it were a costume he
had found in a secondhand store and he was on his way to a
party.

"That is," he observed most casually, "a dog, I believe."

"Bet your ass." Rat beamed. "Beauty, huh?"

"This is a problem, I'm afraid."

"Don't be. His name is Henry. I'm keeping him for a family
that was going to take him to America for a year but found out
that he would have to be quarantined for two months and it
would have broken their heart to do that to their dog. So we
just agreed to take care of him."

"We?" I mumbled. I had heard this story before. The
family had been staying at the Overseas League, and I suppose
I believed Rat's story. I couldn't think of any logical reason she
would have gone out and kidnapped somebody's dog, and I
knew for a fact she hadn't brought it from New York.

"Where are you going?" the official asked. He was
suddenly staring at us both, but mostly Rat. On a late Sunday
afternoon in Paddington Station we seemed egregiously overdressed--me
in a dark double-breasted suit and she in her gold lame
something or other. Standing over six feet in her heels with
Henry on a black leather leash, Rat looked like a Helmut
Newton model on her way to work.

"To some restaurant called the Waterside which will
probably be terribly boring but we were thinking about going
out later when we came back and we were wondering if you
could suggest some place fun. A club sort of place." She blurted
this all at once at a stream-of-consciousness pace. It was news
to me that we were planning to go out afterward. After my day
wrestling with the Mustang, I wasn't even sure I could make it
through dinner without falling asleep.

"You like to go to clubs?" the ponytailed train official
asked.

"Is the Pope Catholic?" Rat demanded.

He concentrated on this for a moment and then smiled. "I
like clubs."

"Great!" Rat made it sound like he had just told her that
she had won the lottery. "Let's meet later on!"

He glanced quickly at me.

"It's okay," Rat explained. "He's not my boyfriend."

She said this with the dismissive tone of a big sister
explaining the presence of a younger brother.

The conductor's face brightened--and then fell when Rat
added, "My boyfriend is in New York." She paused, seeing his
disappointment. "And New York is a long way away. We'll
have lots of fun. Where should we meet?"

He hesitated for a moment, as if wondering if he were the
victim of some cruel practical joke, a Dating Game prank.

"There is a place," he finally said, lowering his voice as if
passing on state secrets, "that we could meet. It is in Soho.
Manitoba Coffee Shop."

"Great! Around midnight, maybe a little later," Rat said,
and then she held out her hand. "Rat Kelly."

"Vetrham. Vetrham West."

I introduced myself and we marched on board--me, Rat,
and the Dog.

It was a local commuter train, with bench seats; more of
an overgrown subway car than a grand long-distance express.
Everyone seemed to be reading one of the London
tabloids--the Daily Mail or Sun--and the headlines
screeched of a fresh U.S. bombing attack on Iraq, the first for
President Clinton.

"I feel better when we are bombing them," the very tall
young man across from me said without a hint of a smile. He
was maybe thirty and had an unfortunate haircut that seemed to
involve a pair of shears and an oval bowl. With his reddish nose
and angular features, he reminded me of a military recruit on his
way to his first posting.

"Them?" I asked, not because I didn't understand but
because I was startled and had to say something.

It was not a subject I really had an opinion on. I had to
admit that it certainly didn't bother me that we were bombing
Iraq.

"Should have marched right into Baghdad when we had
the chance. The best thing that could have happened to them.
Put a Marks and Sparks right smack on Saddam Avenue.
Bloody marvelous." He laughed.

"What's Marks and Sparks?" Rat asked.

"Where you didn't get that dress, I'll tell you that."

"Am I suppose to be offended?" Rat asked pleasantly,
stroking Henry's head. I had to admit that Henry had taken to
train travel with great equanimity, and I wondered if he was an
experienced sneaker-on of trains.

"Complimented, most definitely," our friend with the bad
haircut said, smiling broadly. He arched his eyebrows and
whispered urgently, "Hung 'em up by the lampposts."

"What?" I asked, startled.

"That's what Saddam did to everybody that opposed him
when he came up. Those fundamentalist-type, junior-grade
ayatollahs in training? Drove nails right into their heads. While
their families watched."

He said this with a certain glee, eyes widening in
appreciation. Rat stiffened and, I suppose, so did I.

"Nip that stuff right in the bud. Marvelous." He said this
slowly, for dramatic power, no doubt. He was a great
performer.

"Beautiful scarf," he observed casually to Rat. It was a
long, soft thing. "That's the stuff the baby Jesus would have
loved to have been swaddled in, you can bet on that."

Rat and I looked at each other. Neither of us said a word.
Nor did we say anything until he got off at the next stop, South
Hall.

"Mad," Rat whispered, as if she were afraid he might over-hear.

"Well," I said, "he does have a point. A very upscale sort
of nativity scene, but I could see it." I felt her scarf.

"Polyester," she announced petulantly. "A very fine cut of
polyester."

The bleak suburbs of London rolled past, rows of block
council houses. Flashes of well-tended gardens squeezed in
between the rows made it only more depressing. The soft light
of an English summer cast the red brick in a warm glow. These
places would never look better, and on a December afternoon
when it was getting dark at 3:30 and pools of ice lay in the
cracked asphalt sidewalks, it would be hard to imagine a more
cheerless and despairing scene.

We were heading to the Waterside Inn, about forty miles
outside of London. It was a creation of the Roux brothers, the
pair that had helped teach London what it was like to eat great
food. I had been dreaming about their duckling cured in tea, a
Roux rendition that was supposed to be extraordinarily lean and
delicate, two hard things to come by in a duck.

Everyone who knew the Waterside talked about its
tranquil riverfront setting and described the place as a perfect
country haven. But since leaving London we had been traveling
through what looked to be the set of A Clockwork Orange, a
failed industrial landscape where despair rose like heat waves
from every street.

This was when Rat decided to tell me what apparently she
had been waiting to tell me since that first day in the gym.

"Stuart," she began, in an excited tone that I was learning
to fear, "I've got this idea of how we should do the trip."

"Umm." I was staring at the page-three girl of the Sunday
Mail. It always amazed me how the English could take pasty
and pudgy girls of the sort you saw lounging around every
corner tea shop and celebrate them as pinups. This was
probably a very healthy tendency, all in all--praising the
everyday instead of some unlikely ideal.

"I think we should eat in all of the Michelin three-star
restaurants."

"We are," I said. "Tonight the Waterside, and tomorrow
we've got reservations at La Tante Claire. That's it for
England."

"No, I mean all the restaurants. In Europe."

I smiled, even though the Dog had begun to chew on my
ankle. It was a lunatic notion.

"On consecutive days," she added.

"Rat, I am going to kill this dog. Or leave it at the
restaurant. I'm sure some rich stockbroker will take it home to
his overpriced flat."

"All the three-stars on consecutive days. England first,
then Belgium, Germany, France, Italy. There are only
twenty-nine."

It did have a certain appeal. "That's ridiculous," I said,
which, of course, it was.

"I sort of have to."

"Have to--"

"Eat in all of them."

"This is a mandate from God?"

"Carl," she corrected. "He promised he'd pay for the
whole thing if I ate in all of them on consecutive days."

"You're kidding."

She shook her head.

"I thought he didn't want you to leave New York?"

"Of course he didn't. We had this huge fight. But if I eat in
all twenty-nine nonstop, he pays."

"Why?"

"He likes to challenge me. Particularly with things he thinks
are sort of demeaning."

"What a delightful relationship. And why is eating in all the
three-stars demeaning?"

"On consecutive days, sure it is. Who could actually enjoy
that?"

"I could," I said without hesitation. Then thought about it
for a moment and added, "I think."

"I think it sounds terrible," she said brightly. "But we have
to do it."

"He's a sicko, obviously. Which means that the next
question is going to be, Why is he my boyfriend?"

"You're right. That is the next question."

"Look, it's not that complicated. New York City is full of
strange and twisted interdependent sick kinds of relationships.
Should it be that odd that I happened to find myself in one? You
know what it's like for a girl to come from Wyoming to New
York?"

I thought about this for a moment. "No."

"You meet the most unbelievable creeps imaginable. I
could tell you first-date stories that would stop your heart with
sheer horror."

We both laughed. There was something in the back of my
mind that was going off like a yellow caution light, but I figured I
would just worry about it later.

The Burnham stop passed by and the train thinned out and
then there was more green than junkyards and brick and it
began to look like the countryside England likes to advertise.

"Good," she announced. "I knew you'd like the idea. We'll
leave for Brussels the day after tomorrow."

"Rat!"

"Don't worry. I'll take care of everything."

She jumped up, trailing Henry by his leash. I looked out
the window and saw that we were at Bray-on-Thames.